Home Sweet Home

by Rosalie Bock

(Edited by R. Kujawa)

July 15, 2008

The house at 1339 W. Augusta Boulevard was built in the 1890’s.  My Grandparents bought it in 1900 and by 1910 the census tells me that they had at least seven boarders sharing it walls. It was a Railroad flat design, with the rooms strung in a line from front to back.    Typical of Victorian homes, it had only one closet for guest’s coats, but none in the bedrooms.  And, it had no indoor plumbing until my grandmother added it later.  There were two floors of living space, and a huge basement, the front third of which was used for various businesses through the years.  There was no central heating, but the two huge chimneys held connections for several stoves.  We had electricity when I grew up there, but there was evidence of gaslights having been used in every room.  There was one socket  and one ceiling light  in each room.  We used to plug the washer and iron into a plug\switch that hung from the ceiling fixture. 

By the time I came into being, the house had undergone some serious changes.  There was running water, but no doors for the bedrooms.  The toilet was just that, a narrow room carved out of a bedroom that held a toilet with a wall hung water closet.  There was no hot water until I was seventeen and my brother installed a water heater in the kitchen.  We took full baths in the kitchen in a large tin tub that we had to drag in from the porch  where it hung in storage.  We had to heat the water on the stove a little at a time, and since I was the youngest and smallest, I got the first bath, then more water was added, and my brother had his bath, then my parents.  We all used the same water, and then the tub had to be emptied by hand.  A long arduous process.  My mother had a wringer washer which she used in the kitchen, once again using water heated on the stove.  The wet clothing and linens were hung out to dry on two long clotheslines that were hung from the barn in the back of the house.  The sheets used to come in full of black specks of soot from the smoke that belched out of the many houses in the area.  No one had gas heat until the 1950’s, so lots of coal, wood, and oil was burned to heat the houses.  No one on the block had a tank for oil, we all carried it in ten gallon cans.

We heated our apartment with a stove in the dining room, and kitchen.  During the winter the front part of the house was closed off with drapes.  My brother’s bedroom which was in the front of the house, above the entryway was so cold that water would run down the walls when the weather warmed.  Since we all had feather covers, we were able to sleep fairly comfortably.  The covers were not filled with down, but chicken feathers and they weighed a ton.   We installed new gas lines when I was a teenager and so replaced the nasty coal, oil or wood stoves we had used before.  Chopping wood and carrying coal was a part of my childhood.  Today, I see people waxing poetic about wood stoves in their homes.  I am happy, very happy, to have a thermostat.  The furniture store across the street allowed us to take the wood frames that their furniture was shipped in and we would chop them into small enough pieces to put in our stoves.  We carried the coal in buckets from the storage under the sidewalk.  Heavy, dirty and dangerous, this was probably the most reliable form of heating we had.  If you weren’t careful though, carbon monoxide would escape from the coal stove, so we watched this kind of fire very carefully.  It was a pleasure to have gas heaters installed, even though they heated only the dining room and kitchen. 

Or neighbors didn’t have it much better.  Some of the lower level flats had dirt floors.  We all froze in the winter and sweated in the summer.  During the peak of the hot weather, we all sat outside to cool off. 

The bedrooms were so small that the beds had to be cut to fit into the space. We hung most of our clothes in the enclosed back porch.  Indeed, one of them was made smaller by the inclusion of the bathroom.  I didn’t have a room at all until my oldest brother joined the Navy.  Until then, I slept wherever we could set up a daybed. 

In the fifties, my uncles decided to remodel the house.  We got new windows, removing the large ones that needed ropes and weights to operate.  Fixing these big windows was a real chore, but my mother and I managed to keep them in repair.  New siding and some paint, and we had a nicer looking home.  We knocked out walls and opened a  large archway  between the Living Room and Dining Room.  This allowed for better flow of heat.  There was never any air conditioning.  If it was hot, it was hot. 

We always had a gas range to cook on, but in its early days, there were wood stoves in the kitchens.  My uncle built a shower in the basement, and heated water in a woodstove.  When I used the shower down there, I could hear the subway running right under the house.  I hated using this shower, because the basement was dark and very cold, but it was better than nothing. 

In back of the house was a yard where we grew vegetables (a wartime Victory Garden) and lilacs. This is where I used to lay on my back and watch the seeds from the Cottonwood trees in the PRCUA garden.  It was a beautiful sight.   At the very back of the lot was a barn where my grandfather kept his two horses.  Dolly and Billy were Dappled Greys that he used to pull the carriage for the widow in the funeral cortege.  He always joined the wake after the burial, and horses would bring him home, after he drank too much, from St. Adalbert’s Cemetery straight down Milwaukee Avenue.  Sometimes people would come to him to sit in the manure in the barn  to help their arthritis…  I can think of better cures. 

There was an alley that ran the length of the block.  Peddlers would drive horse drawn carts with fruits and vegetables to sell.  I can still hear the call of the peddler who yelled out “Water Meelone”.  Shopping was an interesting event, one that meant a great deal of walking and carrying.  Each shop was separate.  You went to the green grocer on Noble for vegetables and fruit.  You walked to a butcher shop for meat.  Ours was on Division and Paulina Streets.   There were many Polish Wedlins.  We walked all the way to Damen Avenue for certain items.  Wieboldt’s on Milwaukee Avenue was our department store, and sometimes Goldblatt’s on Chicago Avenue.  My mother and I would carry two shopping bags apiece.  Luckily we had a refrigerator, but no freezer so we bought only what we needed for a week.  Winter was slippery and cold, summer was hot and humid.  I think we are in better health  for all this exercise.  We rarely took the streetcar because money was always in short supply.  These shopping events took the whole of Saturday. 

I have heard that cockroaches are the only beings that can survive a nuclear attack, but they couldn’t live in our house due to my mother’s dynamic cleaning habits.  Our neighbors were not so lucky. I recall seeing a roach swimming in a bowl of leftover cereal.  During this period in history, however, Norway Rats ruled the neighborhood.  They are the big kind that scare the daylights out of you.  They thrived in the alleys where people threw out their refuse uncovered.  My brother was a champion at catching them and keeping them from our property. 

My mother is 99 now, and still on her own in Wisconsin (my brother lives next door). She remembers oil lamps, horse drawn carriages, nickel buckets of beer, fire trucks pulled by horses that sent sparks up from their hooves as they raced to fires on the cobblestones that paved Milwaukee avenue, and her mother sewing dresses for ladies at the beginning of the 20^th century.  She went to school for three years.  She was bewildered by my attending college and still wonders why I didn’t just get a nice job in a bank.  I was the first and only kid on the block to go to college then.  I still remember the pride the other residents on the block showed me when I graduated. 

When the house was demolished it was about 85 years old.  It took a lot of memories with it.